The Sanctions Game

Russia is a mafia state, and it’s appropriate that Russia is fueling its war like a drug cartel:

We can take two lessons from this story. The first is that the tools and techniques used by non-state organizations to survive and prosper can also work for great powers. Russian authorities aren’t doing anything that terrorists and organized crime haven’t done before.

The issue isn’t so much a question of the resolve of the West but instead of the ingenuity of those who seek to evade the surveillance of trade and financial flows.

The returns to smuggling and money laundering are such that someone somewhere will always find it worthwhile to break the law. The paths that drugs and drug money have carved are well-known to authorities in America, Europe, and Russia and yet remain robust nevertheless.

However, as the report indicates, clever detective work can find and target these networks, leaving them open to sanction and potential destruction.

All of this falls under the “weaponized interdependence” literature that Dan alluded to on Monday. Notwithstanding Trump’s hostility to anything “liberal” in nature, he has not been shy to use the tools of influence that the liberal international order has given the United States. One of the biggest questions, as Dan notes, is how far the system can be leveraged without breaking apart. This is also the theme of Henry Farrell’s recent Foreign Affairs piece on the rise and fall of economic statecraft.

In other news we recently learned that Waging War with Gold will be getting a paperback printing and an affordable price! More on this later…